Cecilia closes her eyes and holds out a hand to the aether. ‘I sense avoidance. I sense procrastination.’
‘Very funny.Doyou, though?’
‘Not a jot. I think we die and then that’s it,’ says Cecilia.
‘Apart from Heaven.’
‘Yes, apart from Heaven, of course.’
‘Unless the papists had it right all this time, and there’s purgatory and endless levels of Hell awaiting us sinners.’
Cecilia examines a grass stain on her skirts that is unlikely to wash out. ‘I suppose therewasa reason the village prostitute would wear green.’
‘Darling, you make us sound sordid.’
‘Very sordid. Simply obscene.’ Cecilia smiles with the promise to make it so again and again and again. ‘Perhaps the atheists have it right, and there’s nothing at all after death. Just the cold soil and the worms.’
A thick band of cloud has blown in to cover the yellow disk of sun – an English summer.
Gooseflesh rises along Odette’s arms. She hastens up, shoving their picnic into the wicker basket.
‘I promise when I die to come back and haunt you, if I can,’ says Odette. ‘Teach you a lesson.’
‘That sounds jolly.’ Cecilia shoulders the bag with their booksand paints, and Odette carries the basket as they walk back towards the house, hips swaying and lips sticky. ‘I’ll haunt you and you’ll haunt me, and then we’ll know for sure.’
At the kissing gate to the lane, Cecilia spits in her palm and holds her hand out.
Odette smiles. Palm wet with her own spit, she takes Cecilia’s hand. ‘Deal.’
In this summer idyll, they play like children, running barefoot through fallow fields and high corn, skirts tucked into their waistbands and unpinned hair streaming like a pennant behind a knight. Fields roll gently out across the land, golden with cut corn and dense with thickets of trees and hedgerow. A kestrel glides high, watching for the snuffling field mice gorging on dropped kernels, while butterflies and cabbage moths throng the blackthorn and hawthorn.
Odette is wild and daring, plucking insects from beneath stones, scrambling up trees and wading across moss-slick rocks, but it is Cecilia whose imagination is the dry wood to their blaze, turning mounds into mountains, conjuring castles from stumps of rock and dragon fire from clouds.
They are dying days.
With each moment, Cecilia feels as though she clasps her hand around dust motes in a sunbeam, around moonlight on water. Their days at school together are over. Each summer spent at Herne House, both families living together as one, elaborate picnics spread across the meadows, long evenings of party games and Leo at the piano, Cecilia singing, Lydia sketching – it will not be as it has been. It cannot be. Leo has separated already, too preoccupied with work. George spends more and more time visiting the Continent. Odette has bid them both to go away to university.
It is all slipping away from her.
Odette is slipping away from her.
It is only subtle – the smallest of closed expressions or the angle of her shoulder – but Cecilia can feel her tug against the bounds of their life at Herne House, and in turn, it is as though Odette tugs against her bond with Cecilia. If only she runs fast enough, then perhaps Cecilia can close the gap, keep the cord slack and easy, with no threat that it may break.
2
Odette
THERE IS A STINKlike bilge water throughout the house. As soon as Odette crosses the threshold, the thickness of it meets her nose, and bile rises in her throat. The front and back doors are thrown open against its fetid presence, casting a stark dividing line between the blinding brightness of the sun-blanched courtyard and the cool flagstones of the hall within. The interior is all but impossible to make out – only an inky border to the open door at the back, through which she can see several men with bargepoles and billhooks bent over the moat where it meets the wall of the house and flows beneath the kitchens.
Herne House sits in a cupped valley between low Suffolk hills, surrounded on three sides by a squared-off creek that is known as the moat. A stone-built core remains from the medieval manor house it once was, rising in timber-framed storeys and expanded over time with mismatched wings. Inside, doors hang in the middle of walls; flights of three or four steps go nowhere; windows do not match up to any room, all made of uneven corners and slantwise ceilings.
Odette crosses the wide, oak-panelled hall – the last hold-out of the medieval house – and puts her head outside the back door. There is a strangely swollen mass of white and black and red wedged half under the stonework arch through which the moat runs. A sheep has fallen into the water and died, or diedand fallen in; it does not matter much which, only that it has been pulled downstream by the power of the current, and now the bloated corpse has plugged up the channel, and the brackish, sour water has flooded out across the lawns. One man attempts to hook a limb and draw it out, but the flesh is too weak, and he succeeds only in pulling a leg from the mutton.
Cecilia comes up behind Odette and places a hand hot on her waist. The press of her palm through the thin material of Odette’s shirt is a brand against her skin; she discarded her corset today in protest at the heat that shimmers over the grass, turning it brittle and brown in patches. Water and drought together – the world is dying of too much and too little.
‘Wretched creature,’ says Cecilia. ‘Why is it sheep die so easily? I see them everywhere, caught in hedges or broken in ditches. It is like they have so faint a connection to life it cannot bear weight when leant upon.’
‘That is a very poetic way to say they are stupid.’
